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The original title was to be Bright Young Things, which went on to be that of Stephen Fry's 2003 film adaptation. Waugh changed it because he thought the phrase had become too clichéd. The title that he eventually settled on also appears in a comment made by the novel's narrator in reference to the characters' party-driven lifestyle: "All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...",[1]

Heavily influenced by the cinema and by the disjointed style of T. S. Eliot, Vile Bodies is Waugh's second and most ostentatiously "modern" novel.[2] Fragments of dialogue and rapid scene changes are held together by the dry, almost perversely unflappable narrator.[3] Waugh claims it was the first novel in which much of the dialogue takes place on the telephone.

Adam Fenwick-Symes is the novel's antihero; his quest to marry Nina parodies the conventions of romantic comedy, as the traditional foils and allies prove distracted and ineffectual. War looms, Adam's circle of friends disintegrates, and Adam and Nina's engagement founders. At the book's end, we find Adam alone on an apocalyptic European battlefield. The book shifts in tone from light-hearted romp to bleak desolation (Waugh himself later attributed it to the breakdown of his first marriage halfway through the book's composition[5]). Others have defended the novel's curious ending as a poetically just reversal of the conventions of comic romance.[6][7]

^Waugh, Evelyn, Vile Bodies, p. 146. A good example is the death of Simon Balcairn, a declining earl whose gossip columnist name is "Mr. Chatterbox"; his death forms a bridge between chapters VI and VII. ("He shut the door and the window and opened the door of the gas-oven. Inside it was very black and dirty and smelled of meat. He spread a sheet of newspaper on the lowest tray and lay down, resting his head on it. Then he noticed that by some mischance he had chosen Vanburgh's gossip-page in the Morning Despatch. He put in another sheet. At first he held his breath. Then he thought that was silly and gave a sniff. The sniff made him cough, and coughing made him breathe, and breathing made him feel very ill; but soon he fell into a coma and presently died...Then Adam became Mr. Chatterbox.")